Posts Tagged ‘cultural evolution’

Sexual Robots, under the complete control of their owner! They are never not-in-the-mood, they never “have a head-ache” and they are never too tired to “make love”. They never say NO to what used to be called deviant sexual behavior.

You could be a pot-bellied, stinky, unattractive really old man and your “Playboy Poster dream-girl” will always be horny for you. She will never complain when your sexual performance is not what it once was, even if it ever was!

Given all of this slave-like sexual servitude (without pay!), I think I will take the parenthesizes off the words sex slaves.

You should note that inventors are also developing male sex slaves. As you know liberals claim to hate sexism (overwhelming evidence to the contrary).

There can be no doubt that science and technology have a stunningly powerful effect upon cultural evolution.

With the development of the computer, cell phones and various other internet-connected devises, many of our youth, and older people too, have increasingly retreated from reality into cyberspace and its amazing fantasy world. This trend has been developing for around five or six generations.

As a practicing psychologist, for about 40 years, I have increasingly seen shy and introverted young people and adults withdrawing from social contact into the world of cyberspace. Of course, in my practice, I see a skewed sample of people, not a random sample of the general population.

However, there is a growing body of scientific evidence that there is an association between individual’s increased use of social media and their social isolation. As yet, the causes of this correlation are not known and it will take research to more powerfully assert such attributions.

The following is but one study among many others. However, non-scientific anecdotal evidence is available for all to see.

Starting in the 1960, America legalized the creation of pornography and its wide distribution in all forms. Increased cinematographic technology supplied a pre-existing, seemingly insatiable appetite, with increasingly explicit sexual depictions, including those formerly categorized as deviant.

Along with this cultural evolution, a wide variety of relatively crude “sexual toys”, simple inanimate objects, “sex aids”, became widely available for purchase in “adult” book stores and XXX mail order outlets.

Depending upon one’s sexual appetite, perhaps the most laughable invention was the inflatable sex doll, which was essentially a large reconfigured inflatable plastic beach ball.

I judge that these cultural evolution’s have not been good for our society.

If the following offends you, I certainly apologize for what is a reality therapy session. If you think you will be offended by the display of sexual robots, do not open he following videos.

It is said that ignorance can be bliss. This may sometimes be true until, that is, our ignorance begins to damage our live’s, those of our loved ones…and others upon which the emotional health and welfare of our culture depends.

I hope you will give some thought to how the following technological developments will likely influence the course of a population’s social and emotional development.

Of course, the following videos tout the many personal advantages of owning sexual robots. Counter-arguments consider the dehumanizing of sexuality, the possibility of learning to dominate and sexually abuse real human beings and the the deepening isolation from real people it may bring to many.

Perhaps the presence of sexual robots could be an advantage to an overpopulating world. However, it seems likely that the correlation of education and the disposable income necessary to afford to own and maintain a sexual robot favors a reduction of procreation within the most capable segments of any developing population. This would not seem beneficial to any society.

But, if I could accuratley predict the future I would be a very wealthy man…I can not and I am not.

Still, this old psychologist doubts that the proliferation of robotic sex slaves will be an unalloyed evolutionary blessing. There is just too much room in this development for increasing unsocial and antisocial conditioning and learning outcomes within populations.

Assuming increasing popularity, the significant expense of these first generation robotic “sex slaves” ($4,000 to over $50,000) will lower their expense to the point that they will become affordable to large numbers of people in advanced societies.

What follows is XXX rated; well kinda, sorta…maybe not-so-much to many.

When I first read this article, I immediately recalled the following Biblical quote. This passage has always stuck with me since my youth. I am no Biblical scholar and there appear to be Biblical statements that are in conflict with the one I remember so clearly.

But, if there ever was a mega-example of the following quote about God’s consequences for bad behavior, it would appear to relate America’s Black Dilemma.

From the Bible: Exodus 34:7English Standard Version (ESV)

7″ keeping steadfast love for thousands,[a] forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

Yet, it is illogical to me that a forgiving and benevolent God would endlessly punish both those who have been sinned against (the American Black population) and also, endlessly, the children of the sinners (the American slave owners), who have worked for generations to atone-for and correct the original sin of enslaving the blacks.

In the article, The Black Dilemma, it is stated in the 9th paragraph that “nothing changes no matter how much money is spent,” etc., etc..

Well, if the science of psychology can teach America anything, it should be that it is not the amount of money spent that will ever change a population’s behavior problems, it is rather how the money is spent.

My following previous blog will explain exactly what I mean by this statement.

It will also set the record straight regarding The Black Dilemma article’s overly negative assessment of America’s lack-of-progress in race relations.

In paragraph 9, the author states: “Some argue its a problem of culture, as if culture creates people, in stead of the other way around”.

This is clearly a wrong and gross-oversimplification of an amazingly complex process with a simple name: Cultural Evolution.

Culture and its various evolution’s, or changes, is a fiendishly complex matter. To say that culture creates people is correct, but to say that people create culture is correct.

In fact, culture and the people’s behavior it generates are part of an ever-changing cycle of mutually interacting and determining forces involving the changing environment, the changing behaviors of the people (including their technology, sociopolitical practices and various other traditions), and the effects that all of this has upon the changing behaviors, sociopolitical practices, technologies and various traditions of their future generations. Now, add the effects of various other external forces such as war and people from other cultures immigrating into the culture under study and the complexity of countless bi-directional determinants (causal positive and negative feedback loops) among the receiving culture’s infrastructure, structure and superstructure become mind-boggling.

The explanation, prediction and control of these phenomena remain one of Behavioral Science’s greatest challenges.

Never-the less, the article America’s Black Dilemma (no matter the author) confronts us all with some truths about America and its lack of full recovery from its historical enslavement of black populations

Sadly, however, the main truth is missed: As discussed in my second blog citation above, if a culture rewards bad behavior, it will experience increased rates of bad behavior within its population. This is a true non-technical statement derived from Psychology’s Law of Effect.

This statement will remain true, no matter the race or culture of the population under study.

The following is an elaboration of my answer to one of my readers who noted the parallel between “progressive” liberals loving the beauty of Colorado and then moving there to remake it into their own brand of social and political pathology… and agents of Islam doing the same thing around the world.

I had not thought about the similarities of Liberals remaking the cultures they infiltrate and Islamic Stealth Jihad that is incrementally transforming the World to Islam and Sharia Law. It is not so hard to grasp the implications of any military take-over, but the incremental long-term effects of stealth liberalism and Islamic Jihad are harder to perceive and defend against.

There is nothing new about a particular culture admiring the physical habitat of another and then invading it to gain social and political control within that new domain. They may also gain hegemony in the new culture by generating disproportionately higher birth-rates than the original population, inbreeding, and aggressive recruitment.

In these ways the new culture may transform the older culture and eventually impose their own alien values (political system, laws, more’s and folkways) upon the indigenous culture. The new culture transforms the old one into their own, or perhaps some new hybrid of the of the two cultures.

This transformational process has been in play since the beginning of living time. It has occurred at all levels of biological existence, in all ecosystems. For our purposes, I will call this manifestation of Natural Selection, Cultural Evolution.

Though it is a natural phenomenon, this no reason not to defend against such alien transformations…particularly when it will lead to either behavioral chaos (Colorado) or totalitarianism (Islamic Sharia Law).

Although “Progressive”-Liberal and Islamic Sharia political/social designs are at polar ends of the behavioral-outcomes continuum. They are equally destructive (though in different ways) to the quality of the cultural organism they pathologically infect.

Take your pick: “progressive”-liberal social and political chaos and decline. Or, totalitariansocial and political rigamortise and decline.

The healthy culture, committed to living long and well, should defend to-the-death against either of these cultural design extremes.

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D., 3/28/15

P.S., Thanks to Tom Jacobs for commenting on one of my blogs and stimulating my thinking about these cultural evolutionary dynamics.

Ethics can be defined as the philosophy or science of moral values, duties and ideals of human character, motives, actions and outcomes. Moral behaviors or outcomes are those that conform to judgements in these realms about what is good or bad, right or wrong.

It is mind-boggling to contemplate the ethics of individual actions. A higher-order vortex of complexity is entered when the focus shifts to the ethics of cultural design and evolution.

At either level the concept of good or bad, right or wrong, would at first seem clear to many. But when such matters are put to the test of close analysis, debate and consensus building, we soon encounter a conceptual morass from which there appears to be no escape.

For example, philosopher David Hume wrote:

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not…”

Hume argued that it is not possible to derive moral statements of what ought to be from simple observations and descriptions of what is. Many would argue that this principle, which has been called Hume’s Law, separates facts from values in a way that places morality outside of the purview of scientific evaluation. I will shortly argue that moral values and behaviors can, and should be, submitted to scientific analysis.

Like this:

The survival of freedom itself is at stake, and that future is by no means certain” (pps. 10-11).

What is the truth about this nation’s present state and its direction

Section 1: Could It Be True?

CHAPTER 1. The Vision: A Daydreamer’s Nighmare

This anecdote is actually not true of frogs. However, the story hints at the truth about human beings under many circumstances. Unlike the story of the “frog in the pot”, human beings actually do show an amazing capacity to adapt to environmental and social changes that slowly increase in their damaging qualities. Tragically, the deferred consequences of this chain of adaptations can be ruinous and even lethal to both individuals and societies.

A few years ago, a sickening sweet odor suddenly was present in my home town. It was soon clear that it was a by-product of a new ethanol plant operating on the outskirts of our city. There was an uproar of complaints about the nausea and breathing problems that some citizens attributed to the plant’s emissions. An elderly lady wrote to our newspaper telling a folksy tale about how one could boil a live frog to death, in a shallow pot, without the frog ever leaping out. She maintained that all one had to do was increase the heat of the water very gradually, in stages, and the poor frog would finally boil to death without “twitching a muscle”. The lady felt this was the mechanism behind our failure to react effectively to the poisoning of this nations air.VTM

Fall, 1979

B.F. Skinner, The greatest American psychologist of the 20th Century warned about the common tendency to mistake society for culture when he wrote:

“We tend to associate a culture with a group of people. People are easier to see than their behavior, and behavior is easier to see than the contingencies which generate it”

Substitute the word rule for the word contingency in the last sentence of this quote. Roughly speaking

Cultural Evolution

The behavior and products of a population and its institutions are its culture. Changes in the behavior patterns and products of a population and its institutions is cultural evolution. All cultures evolve. Some evolve in ways that strengthen the odds that their societies will live long and well. Others evolve in ways that lead to the decline or collapse of their societies. I use the terms decline as relative terms to identify a society’s own significantly weakened, diminished and vulnerable state–compared to its former more effective baselines of performance. Decline is a condition in which a society’s individuals and institutions are no longer able to effectively deal with its various problems (crime and other population behavior problems, family disorganization, governmental ineffectiveness, resource management, economic problems, and foreign aggression or invasion, etc.). Decline is not likely to lead to the total disappearance of modern large and complex societies (as it did with the collapse of the Incas or Aztec sociocultures). The actual Collapse of a socioculture may follow a period of decline. For modern complex societies, collapse may occur when socioculture becomes increasingly vulnerable to chronic debilitated functioning and eventual conquest by, and assimilation into, other predatory cultures.

I am very sad to tell you that I believe America is now showing strong indicators that it is well into an extended period of decline.

B. F. Skinner hinted at what is needed for a culture’s evolutionary success when he said: “The evolution of a culture is a gigantic exercise in self-control.”

How do you think America is doing in the area of self-control?

Regarding the stunning changes in American culture over the past few decades that I will document in the coming chapters, there are no simple unidirectional causes. What drove these great changes? Was it the car? Was it the television? Was it was the pill? How about working mothers? I wish the causes were that simple and singular. There are only fiendishly complex “swirls” of many causes that interact with each other and then fold back upon themselves, to create even greater causal complexity. For example, as a practicing psychologist I have witnessed the effects of a changing American culture upon families and children. And, reciprocally, I have also observed the effects of the changed families and changed children back upon our society and culture.

As our apparent fifty-year cultural decline continues to deepen, it is alarming that both of our political parties have failed to reverse the key elements of our decline.

The burning question is: Why is everything failing?! The smoldering answer is: Because great and powerful forces of change move undetected beneath the surface of our consciousness and beneath the surface of our common, day-to-day observable experiences. Scientists have long known that the most precious secrets are those that are hidden by what we commonly experience and think we understand. This has been true for physics, astronomy, economics, anthropology and psychology. It is also true about the present declining state of America’s socioculture. The interacting causes are plain to see if only we can look at them from a special perspective.

Generally, the cultural things that we see are only reflection of a host of underlying causes that are both unseen and poorly understood by almost everyone. It is my aim to make some of these hidden causes of our collective behavior patterns clearly visible and understandable. I believe that educating the voting public about cultural design changes that will benefit or damage their loved ones is the key a better future. For America to live long and well, the voting public must understand the relationship between our own, and our policy maker’s, culture-changing decisions that provide immediate gratification to millions of people and/or the our government, but also lead to delayed painful or disastrous consequences.

My career as a psychologists has been similar to that of other professions that constantly expose their workers to the tragedies, pain, and loss which have become an increasing part of life in America. I, like countless others, have been quietly traumatized for decades by the damaging effects upon my clients and their loved ones wreaked by their own personal responses to our increasingly damaged culture. But the effects of such trauma can be channeled into a force for good, and that is my intention in this book. I will tell you about what we now know about human nature and the scientific principles that change our behavior and that of our culture. I will also present a clear and understandable explanation of important aspects of the sciences of human behavior and what they can tell us about the decline and possible recovery of our culture.

A contingency is a rule that specifies the relationship between some behavior and some consequence. For example, a child may hit another and be rewarded or punished. An adult may start a business and make money or go broke. A city may legalize gambling and make money, but may later suffer more crime and damage to its families. A government might legalize pornography, drugs, and prostitution and enjoy increased tax revenues, but later suffer the greater costs of increased damage to its population. All of these are examples of some behavior done by individuals or groups of individuals, and the consequences that may follow as a result.

Regarding the “Boiling the Frog” fable and the story of poor old Bowser, a similar chain of events happens to individual humans within their cultures. When small, slow, incremental changes in their culture occur it will seem as though the changes do not matter, or perhaps that there have been no real significant changes at all. To the different generations that age with their cohorts across different but slightly overlapping time-frames, the changes across time will be harder to detect. Older populations may see the changes within the younger population’s time-frame as extreme, or even aberrant but to a younger population it can be perceived as the very comfortable norm.

America has been called the Great Society–and it is certainly that. Our society is a unique place, a population, and a great number of institutions that function together so we can live our lives with greater security and success. Among the many important things a society does, is to provide a supportive infrastructure to its citizens who have and rear healthy children. Although we Americans generally do not have children in order to perpetuate our own society, our having and rearing healthy children is essential to our societies’ survival.

All societies have cultures. For our purposes, culture is not a place or a group of people. It is the behavior, actions, practices, and the material creations of the people and institutions in a society.

In my writing, I will use the terms society and culture as defined above. Sometimes, often when I wish to speak of the combination of these two forces, I will use the term: Socioculture.

These cultural changes can show in very maladaptive and damaging behaviors within our population and can result in a steady erosion of our culture’s viability. When I use the word viability, I mean the ability to remain strong and effective and avoid decline and collapse. Like the fabled American Frog, or old Bowser the cat, citizens and policy makers within the failing culture may carry-on to the end as though all is well and nothing is wrong.

The purpose of this book is to analyze relatively recent culture-wide rule/policy and population behavior changes from the perspective of their observed or likely delayed effects upon the viability of our American Culture. I will admit that there is much unknown about such matters. However there are many scientific principles, from a variety of fields, that are very well known and I remain astonished and saddened that most of us know little or nothing about them. I am convinced that we can use these principles to reverse America’s sociocultural decline.

It is way past time for us to organize the most robust principles of our relevant sciences into a general understanding of how our past and present self-destructive cultural practices have caused the obvious and stunning social problems we face today. This kind of self-understanding is exactly what our culture (and others) need to live very long and productive lives. Nothing should be more important to Americans at this time–nothing could be more important to humankind.

Just as we were once poised to travel to the moon, and “one giant push would get us there”; so it is with our “cultural space ship” which carries us and our dear families’ linage to the future. We presently do not know enough about the evolution of cultures to achieve the full attainment of our most sensible hopes and dreams for our beloved children and their offspring. But, given what is known, there is no excuse for the depth of our collective ignorance about such matters, or for the present sorry state of cultural affairs that we have accidentally determined for ourselves. I believe that with one big sustained educational push, we Americans could do spectacularly better at securing a brighter and more promising future.

Prelude to a Vison

In the introduction to his book, Imperial Stars: Republic and Empire, author Jerry Purnelle refers (pps. 3 & 4) to Niccolo Machiavelli, in The Discourses, who described six kinds of government. Machiavelli considered three kinds of government to be “good” but he noted their tendency to be corrupted and to become “very bad.”

“Thus monarchy becomes tyranny; aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy; and popular government lapses readily into licentiousness. So that a legislator who gives to a state which he founds, either of these three forms of government, constitutes it but for a brief time; for no precautions can prevent either one of the three that are reputed good, from degenerating into its opposite kind; so great are in these attractions and resemblances between the good and the evil”. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses.

My primary concern is with the slide of our Republic of the United States toward a widespread state of hedonism and licentiousness. Jerry Pournelle,familiar with such cultural evolutions from the early Greeks and Romans to the present, addresses this trend:

“Democracies endure until the citizens care more for what the state can give them than for its ability to defend rich and poor alike; until they care more for their privileges than their responsibilities; until they learn they can vote largess from the public treasury and use the state as an instrument for plundering, first those who have wealth, then those who create it.

The American people seem to be learning that fatal lesson. The last Forty years have seen the United States reject the temptations of empire, but nearly succumb to the seductions of democracy. We have reached the abyss, but not yet taken the last step over

Perceiving the reality of our condition is not so easy as it would first appear. Often what is perceived is but a reflection of other hidden, underlying, events and structures. So it is with the great complex mix of events that now threaten America.

It was 1983. I had been reading intensively in the field of psychology ever since I declared it as my psychology major in 1963. I had obtained my Ph.D. in 1971, and had began to teach psychology at Indiana University South Bend in 1970. My area of specialized interests were Learning, Child Development, and Behavior Modification. By 1979, I had written my first book on parenting and teaching children. It had already become apparent to me in the early 1970’s that certain cultural changes (population mobility, fewer extended families, fewer nuclear families, fewer children, maternal employment, infant and daycare centers, etc.) had robbed many of America’s parents of a common understanding of what children need to grow to be healthy adults. Many parents simply did not know what they needed to do to help their children achieve this essential outcome.

Little did I know then, that an unanticipated event was about to occur that would change my perceptions, goals, and creative actions for the rest of my life. I was asked to join a private practice on a part-time basis.

The following years of “practicing what I preached” within the crucible of countless hours of therapy with troubled children, adolescents, and adults, and families was a powerfully transforming experience. It catalyzed my thinking about what I had learned in all of my studies, my university teaching and my personal research. So many things that I had learned were now directly connected and highly relevant to the very real human problems I was then trying to solve in my tiny corner of America.

As you may know, university professors often accuse counselors and psychotherapist of seeing a “biased world of only trouble and misery”. Counselors and psychotherapists accuse university professors of “living in ivory towers”, dealing with problems only in the abstract, and being highly impractical.

In 1979, I began to live in both worlds and I believe the combination of these worlds has allowed me to see things more clearly than many of the professionals who work exclusively in either one of these domains. In 1983 the combined results of these experiences spontaneously and suddenly arranged themselves in my thinking and in a mental-visual form that stunned and motivated me like nothing else ever has.